A Message from Alex

Hi dear friends,

I began the entrepreneurial journey in 2014 as my quest to fuse my passions of creating and sewing with my deep desire to help people. I never knew quite how to merge this, in fact, I'm still figuring it out. I started out with a Family Ministry degree that then turned into a Fashion Design degree, later studying in Paris, and I've found myself in Cleveland, Ohio which is a place that seemed to bring all of my dreams and desires to life.

Alex + Ikat was born out of these personal passions that I've carried with me since I first started realizing that my creative ability was actually a gift from God and I wanted to do something about it. This began as a place for me to create bag designs for the sewing enthusiast, selling them as bag kits and sewing patterns. These bags were created with intentionality. I would design a bag for a certain place, and then a percentage of every profit I recieved would be given to that certain place the bag was designed for. What started as a beautiful idea eventually got bogged down and muddled. Even I, the owner of the company, didn't really know what I was doing. Plus I wasn't selling anything anyway, so why did it matter, right?

Call it what you want, but one full-time job turned into another, and for whatever reason my time and energy to fuel my personal desire dwindled. I lost vision for what I was doing and Alex + Ikat sat in the background, waiting eagerly for me to return to it.

In early 2017, it's as if I'm starting the process all over again. My main and true desire is very simple: I want to create beautiful things and inspire people along the way. I merge my name, Alex, with a word that I love, Ikat (don't worry, you'll learn more about that word along the way) and ask you to join me as I create custom designs in a variety of forms, teach creative workshops, and write about my process in the Alex + Ikat Journal; telling all kinds of stories and sharing about what God's doing and what's going on in my life. I've always kept journals for as long as I can remember, and I've always found comfort, wisdom and grace from those that can share things through writing. Maybe you can find a little bit of that here, too.

Here, I fuse the creative with inspiration. I offer beauty with vulnerability, authenticity and a genuine desire to empower you and love you as a human being.

To join me in this journey is an invitation to get to know me. To join me means to be a part of creating wonder in the everyday. To join me means that you've given yourself permission to process life and find the beauty in it. To join me means to enter in to an adventure to create your own.

The tagline of the company is this: Alex + Ikat is about a girl named Alex and her process of creating beauty.